Simon Skinner is on one level a riper, more knowingly gleeful version of Christopher Lee's Lord Summerisle, holding the various local groups in his thrall and leaving our heroes shuddering in his wake. 'The Greater Good' stands in for the harvest, and the murders of the village folk to secure the Best Village status doubles for the 'pagan' need for a human sacrifice to make the crops grow. Like Robin Hardy's cult classic, Hot Fuzz centres around a lone individual with extremely high standards of right and wrong coming into an isolated(ish) rural community with a dark secret. You could even describe the film as The Wicker Man with jokes - a comparison supported by the presence of Edward Woodward in a delightful supporting role. Not only is the introduction of Nicholas Angel so wonderfully English - being sent to a rural patch so his colleagues won't be embarrassed by how brilliant he is - but the whole mystery plot is essentially a modern-day riff on The Wicker Man. The film is able to get away with this section towards the end, sending up Lethal Weapon and countless westerns, because of how quintessentially British its set-up and opening section is. It's not just that the guns are being trained on pensioners and farmers rather than cowboys or gangsters - it's that the film pokes fun at this shooting style to create a spectacle all of its own. Where Michael Bay and his derivatives use needlessly rapid editing to hide their lack of substance or attention spans, Wright uses rapid editing to send up the relentless, often idiotic pace of action movies. Specifically, it manages to employ the language of fast cuts and frenetic action that is part and parcel of modern Hollywood without losing either its unique identity or sight of its subject matter. One of the greatest tricks that Hot Fuzz manages to pull off lies in its use of rapid editing. Wright chose to shoot the bulk of the film in his home city of Wells, quipping: "I love it but I also want to trash it." The county has taken the film to heart, holding public screenings in Wells to mark its 10th anniversary last year and voting it the winner of the 'World Cup of Somerset' on Twitter. In particular, it takes the suburban drudgery and small social landscape of Shaun of the Dead (where zombies serve as the perfect interruption to our lead's repetitive social life) and expands it to lovingly skewer an entire way of life in the West Country. The film builds on everything that made Shaun of the Dead such an enjoyable watch and refines it, thanks in no small part to the excellent chemistry of Pegg and Nick Frost. Where something like Heathers deliberately and consciously tore into what had gone before it, and the Naked Gun films used its premise as a springboard into all manner of goofy shenanigans, Hot Fuzz is a love letter to the genre with a distinctly British twist, simultaneously displaying affection for something and taking the piss out of both the genre and itself. Simon Pegg himself has claimed that the film is not a spoof, arguing in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that iy "lacks the sneer that a lot of parodies have that look down on their source material. One of the issues with classing Hot Fuzz as a parody - as opposed to a pastiche or homage - is the affectionate relationship it has towards its main characters. Hot Fuzz redresses this balance quite beautifully, being a fantastic film which succeeds as both a rip-roaring pastiche and a genuine thriller on its own. Britain has always been more in love with the procedural drama or detectives beating the police at their own game, both of which have always made for gripping television. Where Hollywood had given the world Lethal Weapon, Point Break, the Police Academy series and the Naked Gun trilogy, Britain's cinematic relationship with the police has been largely confined to piecemeal efforts like Carry On Sergeant. When Edgar Wright came to make Hot Fuzz, he spoke about the fact that Britain lacked a cop movie genre to rival that of the United States. Tolkien attempted for English mythology with The Lord of the Rings), or the most common route: assimilation of multiple other sources to create something unexpected and unique. Nicoll once memorably said that the English language "has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." This lack of an original culture - since the Norman conquest, at any rate - tends to produce one of three responses: extreme resentment and xenophobia, invention of a new culture to fill the void (as J. British culture has always been something of a melting pot, incorporating elements from other cultures and turning them into something new.
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